mosquito hell

If insects gross you out, please don’t read any further. If you don’t mind killing the occasional mosquito, or fifty, read on.

This morning Kiddo#1 put forth his theory that mosquitoes were created by Satan, although when I asked him to clarify, he agreed they were not exactly created, but rather that Satan had evolved a lovely insect, which we no longer know, and turned it into the army of flying blood-suckers currently clinging to the outside of our house.

We live in the Swamp. With a creek stagnating in our back yard, it’s not hard to figure out we’ll have a lot of mosquito activity. The county will come through for free and bomb my property with pesticides whenever I call them. Sometimes they have helicopters just do it anyhow, for kicks and giggles. (If you’re lucky, they tell you first.) And I know from our previous two years here that the mosquito population has a brief late-springtime surge because the mosquitos mature faster than the things that eat mosquitos.

Yesterday, every window screen was covered in mosquitos. By “covered” I mean at least thirty mosquitos per window. All day.

Last night, I did a sweep of the bedroom before going to sleep, but at 11 I was out of bed because I could hear them. Not that high-pitched whine when they buzz by your ear (although I got that too) but a lower, constant buzz.

I sat up with the lights on, waiting. During the next twenty minutes, I’d kill twelve of them.

I checked all the windows to make sure the screens were in place. And when I went into the bathroom, the window was open and I could see mosquitos clinging to the screen. There had to be a hundred of them, just hanging there. And when I got close, I could hear them.

That low, throbbing hum. Exactly what I heard in my bed. So I shut the window, and I shut every window in the bedroom. And so help me, I could still hear them through the glass.

That nearly drove me over the edge. The thought of all these humming, buzzing insects covering the outside of my house. Eventually I put in ear plugs in order to sleep at all.

At four, I woke up and found my Patient Husband killing mosquitos (we got three more) and when I got up for real, the kids and I killed about ten. Plus I trapped and released a wasp that had gotten inside too.

My Patient Husband said, “Do you know anywhere that doesn’t have mosquitoes?”  I said, “That place where they filmed March of the Penguins?”

They’re back on the screens now. Anyone know a realtor in Antarctica?